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athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to
be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as
difficult to attain.
All the while, with one part of his mind, he wondered how soon they would shoot him. "Everything
depends on yourself," O'Brien had said; but he knew that there was no conscious act by which he
could bring it nearer. It might be ten minutes hence, or ten years. They might keep him for years in
solitary confinement; they might send him to a labor camp; they might release him for a while, as they
sometimes did. It was perfectly possible that before he was shot the whole drama of his arrest and
interrogation would be enacted all over again. The one certain thing was that death never came at an
expected moment. The tradition—the unspoken tradition: somehow you knew it, though you never
heard it said—was that they shot you from behind, always in the back of the head, without warning, as
you walked down a corridor from cell to cell.
One day—but "one day" was not the right expression; just as probably it was in the middle of the
night: once—he fell into a strange, blissful reverie. He was walking down the corridor, waiting for
the bullet. He knew that it was coming in another moment. Everything was settled, smoothed out,
reconciled. There were no more doubts, no more arguments, no more pain, no more fear. His body
was healthy and strong. He walked easily, with a joy of movement and with a feeling of walking in
sunlight. He was not any longer in the narrow white corridors of the Ministry of Love; he was in the
enormous sunlit passage, a kilometer wide, down which he had seemed to walk in the delirium
induced by drugs. He was in the Golden Country, following the foot-track across the old rabbitcropped
pasture. He could feel the short springy turf under his feet and the gentle sunshine on his face.
At the edge of the field were the elm trees, faintly stirring, and somewhere beyond that was the stream
where the dace lay in the green pools under the willows.
Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror. The sweat broke out on his backbone. He had heard
himself cry aloud:
"Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!"
For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of her presence. She had seemed to be not
merely with him, but inside him. It was as though she had got into the texture of his skin. In that
moment he had loved her far more than he had ever done when they were together and free. Also he
knew that somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help.
He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself. What had he done? How many years had he
added to his servitude by that moment of weakness?
In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots outside. They could not let such an outburst go
unpunished. They would know now, if they had not known before, that he was breaking the agreement
he had made with them. He obeyed the Party, but he still hated the Party. In the old days he had hidden
a heretical mind beneath an appearance of conformity. Now he had retreated a step further: in the
mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner heart inviolate. He knew that he was in